Massive Feedback Drop

Someone who is testing the app showed it to a few friends, and I managed to strike a bit of a feedback jackpot. So after work, I've been chipping away.

The high level feedback basically centers on user-interface and intuitiveness, especially for newer players. The good news is that it's not changing stuff for the most part, it's polishing stuff.

An example: the new folks weren't able to clearly distinguish that some NPC conversations had multiple replies that you could use, and how they were different. This was due to the way it was displayed. So I've tweaked the output to make it really obvious - and it really is just some borders, some layout stuff, and it wasn't overly difficult - but it's suddenly much more obvious.

There's a few more things like that I'll be working on with priority, as I have to admit, I'd sort of had most of these issues already floating in the back of my head as "nice to fix..." things, but not really looking at them as a priority - and this feedback really jolted me out of world-building and into polishing the basics more.

There's a bunch more things to fix, so that's going to be my focus for the near future over other fun stuff for a bit.

Testing and Bugs

I've been bug fixing things that I could have sworn black and blue were working, as well as having a friend do some solid testing.

So, token purchases work again. I could have sworn they'd gotten to a point where things did indeed work. Anyhow. That's indeed now working.

In testing, I've also found that I need to tweak some conversation, as I swear, my friend started and finished a quest that I am sure he shouldn't have been given yet - so there's a bit of that to check into. Just conversation triggers, so nothing too major.

Anyhow. Improvements! And it's also great to see the majority of the game working nicely, without the issues that were in it before.

Persistent Effects on Characters

One of the things I'd sort of half implemented so far, but not really fully gotten around to, was keeping the character state up to date on the server. I sort of just didn't really need it. I'd half implemented some aspects of it, much of the database was ready to handle it. But not quite there.

So over the last few evenings, I've made a point to tweak things, so that as characters stats are going up and down, the server is across it, so if you log out or need to come back in on a different device, it'll pick up where it left off. That means persistent buffs/defbuffs will be there. Characters that are dead will still be dead when you log back in and so on.

As I've been running about doing all this testing, my characters have been building up and up in terms of XP, and they've got decent gear as well, so I needed to head all the way up to Bridge's Tor where there's some rather nasty spawns - and sure enough, they picked on my party quick smart, knocking down Sparkie, my Mage, and shortly after I took the screenshot, Chester, my Cleric.

Luckily I have a few test items on vendors that can resurrect (or kill) characters so I used one of those for my Chester, and when he was a bit recovered, he brought Sparkie back to life as well - but it does remind me, that I probably need to code up an interface where Effects can be bought from a vendor - so if your healer dies, or doesn't have the skills to bring a party member back from the dead, there will be places to go to where a vendor can do it for a price. I'd need to do quite a bit of code and maybe some database stuff for that - so for now, it's going to be scrolls you can buy I think.

Oh, and in terms of bugs, I fixed up a few good ones - like letting "dead" characters take healing (not not resurrecting) spells, watching their stats rise, but still not being able to activate them etc. That's been fixed now. 

Quick Realm Update

Super quick one from me tonight: I've been doing some updates to bits of the world that weren't as finished as I thought - there were a few tunnels and beaches where the world was in a pretty "basic" form, in generally just the background layer. I finished up the bits that needed fixing on those areas, popped in some rocks, layers and made it look finished. I then went through and set the base lighting for all the realms to look hopefully where it needs to be. I'll give it a run-through tomorrow to make sure that the base lighting looks about right, then I can finish up the various quests that need final touches-up before we;re ready for beta!

Cyclycal Events and Starting Items

I'll start with the Oopsie first. 

The other day, I did item binding. Needed. Great. I needed it to give out useful starting equipment to characters, but then also mixed it with the token purchase code I also wrote up recently, so you have a choice of starting equipment for your characters rather than just what I gave you. Moving on.

On top of what you can buy with your guild tokens, I thought it would make sense for characters to start with some rudimentary gear, so I created some super basic "farm-boy" or "tavern-girl" gear. And I wrote some code to give it to characters that were created. And I sat there trying to work out how to start it being equipped already - which you'd think was an easy thing to do. And I was there with you, thinking it would be easy to make that so. And we were both wrong. I spent a good part of the weekend - which actually ended up being quite busy with family stuff - trying to work out why on earth things weren't loading up and showing as expected. Anyhow. Eventually I found what to do, and now it works nicely. Oopsie.

The other one I've meant to add for a long long time has been events around the day/night cycle and each of of the moon phase cycles. The idea was always that certain creatures - or actually in my mind, mushrooms as reagents - could only be found at night. Or something like that, but only when the Death moon phase was full. And so, I also got that coded up nicely. I'll start using that in zones soon - but it's been on my to-do list, so knocking that off is great.

Guild Vendor and Combat Effects

So, I didn't get an awful lot of time this evening, but I did manage to knock over a slow-down effect much quicker than I thought it would take, so complete win there.

So, one of the thing that was irking me, was that if you didn't engage in combat, you could effectively just keep running past things, and they might get a hit in, more so if they had ranged attacks, but it was basically very easy to simply leg it past anything. So, I've changed things up, so that when you get hit by something outside of combat, it slows you down for a moment, basically trips you up. Consecutive hits will impact this more significantly. The idea is, you can probably leg it past one or two creatures without TOO much hassle, but trying to make it past a crowded cave corridor? Not a great idea.

Amusingly, that got to working exactly as I wanted really quickly, so I then whipped up some more items, and Floren now has a Guild Vendor, where new characters will be able to use their initial guild chits to pick up a good bit of armor, or a handy weapon of their choice. There's gear there for each class, and I'll put a few more spell and prayer books up there so that mages and clerics will have more options to start with too, before they collect some further equipment later on.

Item Binding Done and Dusted!

Somewhere along the way, I looked at implementing items that will Bind to a character, either when equipped, or when picked up - and although I needed to implement these, I needed to update so many tables and locations that I've just pushed it to the back ever since.

First off, why have these items? Well, sometimes, you just need to earn things for yourself is the shortest, simplest answer. If there's a quest series with a really cool reward at the end, I'd hope players want to complete that for themselves, and not just buy the item from an auction house, from some other player that finished that quest series a long time ago. Secondly, if there's a quest to gather something off a creature nearby, the purpose of that quest is to go hunt those creatures - not find someone else selling those items on an auction house.

Now, some items that are great items, will simply be a rare drop off a particular creature. No issue there, you will be able to trade those, but again, I think that really good items will bind once they are equipped.

Right, so with all the reasoning out of the way, the good news is, that it's all done! The various confirmation dialogues, the changes in the editor, the multitude of changes to database tables, both on my development machine, and on the server for player-data. It's been quite a few evenings of solid, and sometimes very tedious work. But It's done.

It also means, that I can now give each starting character a token from their starting class guild - where you'll be able to trade that in for a choice of weapons or armor fit for that class. Something decent to get each character started!

Also, I've said auction house, as the plan is to completely have one. Eventually. It's just not there yet. But it will be. Eventually!